In Mindanao, Ancient Tribe Or 70's Hoax?

By SETH MYDANS, Special to the New York Times

Published: December 7, 1987

MANILA, Dec. 6—
On a remote mountaintop overlooking the jungles where they live, a dozen of the world's most primitive people fell obediently to their knees as an evangelical preacher from the big city told them he was converting them to Christianity.

''You will have eternal life. No more death,'' cried the Manila preacher, Roger Arienda, and the tribesmen, receiving his message through a two-step translation, murmured, ''Aha, oho.''

Mr. Arienda is a partisan in a growing controversy here in which this primitive group has become the focus of a tangle of modern-day rivalries. Dispute Touches Many Interests

In recent weeks, new challenges to their authenticity have been raised and battle lines have been drawn that appear to involve major business interests as well as logging and mining concerns, local politicians and armed bands, scholars and newspapers.

The tribesmen, seemingly obedient to the wishes of their various questioners, have alternately sworn that they are genuine Stone Age Tasaday, or that they were paid to pretend to be Tasaday, or that they were paid to say they had pretended to be Tasaday.

''I see the innocence and simplicity being layered over with deceit,'' said John Nance, an American journalist who published a book on the tribe and has now become embroiled in the controversy.

''They are trying to survive,'' he said. ''It is a classic and deep Philippine response: 'Who do you want me to be?' '' Marcos Aid Becomes Liability

When they were discovered by modern man in 1970, the tribe, numbering only two or three dozen, was hailed as one of the most primitive groups to be found in many years.

Anthropologists described them as food gatherers with no knowledge of agriculture or metal-working, and their language was said to contain no word for the sea or for another people.

Philippine officials secured for them a vast protected zone in which they lived quietly for nearly 15 years until the departure of the former President, Ferdinand E. Marcos.

At that moment, everything Mr. Marcos had touched appeared to have been tainted by fraud, and a series of journalists who visited the Tasaday, finding them wearing T-shirts instead of leaves, pronounced them a hoax.

Their defenders replied that the T-shirts, along with some metal tools and techniques of hunting, had been introduced in recent years by outsiders, including wives imported from a somewhat more advanced tribe. Tycoon's Motives Questioned

The controversy seems only to have grown.

Mr. Arienda is a partisan of the man who said he discovered the tribe, Manuel Elizalde Jr., the owner of a newspaper and heir to one of the country's most wealthy families, with extensive logging, mining, liquor and brewing interests.

Under Mr. Marcos, Mr. Elizalde headed Panamin, the Cabinet-level office that handled minority affairs, and he became, Mr. Arienda said, the only god the Tasaday had known until Mr. Arienda's recent evangelical visit.

Early this year, he quietly reappeared to reclaim his businesses, and in an interview last week he said he had since been battling rivals for his liquor enterprise whose connections reach into the high levels of the current and former administrations. Potential Bonanza for Loggers

The Tasaday controversy, he said, is an attempt to discredit him and to drive him from the country again.

''There's a lot more to it than meets the eye,'' Mr. Elizalde said, producing a blackboard on which he sketched a bewildering maze of competing business and political interests.

''The Tasaday thing took on a life of its own,'' he said. ''Logging interests, the Congress, academe all became involved.''

If the Tasaday can be shown to be a hoax, vast tracts of jungle, one of the last virgin regions in the country, might be opened to logging and mining. The competition is fierce in a region where the population has doubled since the Tasaday were discovered.

At the end of his presentation, with chalk dust still lingering in the air, Mr. Elizalde said, ''In this whole case, the truth becomes insignificant. Whether the Tasaday are fake or not is really incidental.'' The Lure of Civilization

To Mr. Nance, author of ''The Gentle Tasaday,'' who was on a visit to Manila, the question remained of passionate importance.

Accused of everything from forcing the Tasaday to disrobe for his photographs to teaching them to make stone tools, Mr. Nance said he sometimes asked himself, in moments of despair, ''Could I possibly, in some incredible way, have been wrong?''

Like the anthropologists who first studied them and then revisited them early last year, he said it was not surprising that the tribesmen were now very different from the primitive group he had first recorded.

Once the outside world had touched them, he said, there could be no turning back to the primitive ways of their past.

''What will kill them off in the end is that they like that stuff, just like anybody else,'' he said. ''They like the rice. They like the tobacco.''